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In tenth grade, I read a biography of Ernest Hemingway. I used to claim to have read a lot of books I hadn’t read, and I thought that if I read Hemingway’s biography I wouldn’t have to actually read him. But the biography amazed me. Hemingway didn’t go to an office; he travelled around all the time and did only cool things. I, too, wanted to travel around and do only cool things.

I was a sad, nervous kid, fat, acne-wracked, living in a house where my parents were always shouting. We didn’t have much money. I had a brain-damaged older brother and, when he was in the hospital, we would steal whatever we could find there. At home, my father used to wear a thin robe with the name of the hospital printed on the back.

Writing had allowed Hemingway to lead a glamorous life. I decided that I was going to be a writer. I had written stories before, but they had all been terrible. I believed I had written only two good lines in my life. These were from a science-fiction story I had attempted: I have seen stars swoon into darkness. I have seen cliffs of stardust a hundred billion miles high. I was so proud of these lines that I would recite them whenever I had the chance. The biography said that Hemingway wrote very simply, so that anything false would be exposed. I thought that Hemingway might have chosen to write this way for moral reasons, but I would do so because I wasn’t capable of doing any better.

Hemingway’s novel “The Sun Also Rises,” from 1926, is about an American man who was injured in the First World War and was left incapable of having sex. This man and his friends live in Paris. They are alcoholics and traumatized by the war, and they couple and uncouple and travel to Pamplona for the running of the bulls. I sat at my desk in my small room and read it. I believed that the book was going to show me how to escape my life, but I got to the end of the first chapter and found that it had made no impression. The writing was so plain it had no flavor. People walked in and out of scenes and talked but didn’t do anything. I sat at my desk hollow with fear. How was I going to become a writer and travel around and do cool things when I didn’t even appreciate good writing?

I started reading the chapter again. This time I read very slowly and tried to experience each sentence. The opening line of “The Sun Also Rises” is “Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton.” The second time I read it, I imagined someone saying these words out loud. I stopped at the period and allowed there to be silence. The sentence felt self-contained, as if it wasn’t trying to be anything but itself. It was like a smooth pebble. Now that I am fifty-four, if I were to describe why it works, I would say that having nouns at both ends of a sentence can make it seem complete and self-sufficient. This was probably what I was feeling when I was fifteen.

The second sentence is “Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn.” Even to my teen-age self, this was a weird sentence. The “much” seemed unnecessary, there only to call attention to itself, to the fact that someone was speaking. But who was being addressed? And the two “that”s—the first one functioning as a way to pace the sentence, and the second a statement of fact—had a disconcerting effect. Even now, encountering these differing “that”s feels like having one foot safely planted while the other slips out from under me. From my current perspective, I’d add that the second sentence engages with certain issues that were fundamental to modernism in English-language fiction. This particular strain of modernism grappled with the difficulty of capturing in language the nonverbal aspects of subjective experience. With this strange second sentence, Hemingway asserted that “The Sun Also Rises” was a story being told, and thus side-stepped some of the issues that occupied James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Ford Madox Ford.

I kept reading. When I didn’t respond to a sentence, I tried to take it in more deeply by counting the number of words in it and circling the punctuation. By the end of the first chapter, I was beginning to experience Hemingway’s language in the way that I think it was intended to be experienced. And, by the end of the book, I was a different person. The difference felt physical, as if I had been picked up and relocated. It was like moving a refrigerator and being able to see clearly where it once stood. I now felt truly connected to language and therefore to a history of people who loved language. I felt less alone. I felt that art was important and moral.

After “The Sun Also Rises,” I read everything that Hemingway had written, and I read it in the same slow manner. When I read “A Moveable Feast,” I wondered how someone who could write so well could ever die by suicide. When I read “The Fifth Column,” it reminded me of the silliest parts of “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” When I read “The Old Man and the Sea” and then some critical assessments of the book, I thought about whether it really mattered that some of the details—such as a fisherman being able to lug miles of fishing line to his boat—made no sense.

When I had finished reading Hemingway, I started writing at a much higher level. Hemingway had taught me how to say one thing while suggesting something else, how to make the resulting tension serve as a substitute for plot. I loved the challenge of writing a scene without dialogue labels, and the marvellous effect of doing this: I felt as if I were floating inside the room with my characters.

By the time I was in my twenties, though, I had become irritated with Hemingway. The explanation I offered for my dislike was that the guy seemed to know nothing about human beings. So many of his characters were stoic and brave. Actual humans tend to be confused, vibrating, changing. They doubt themselves and then blame themselves and others for the doubt. I argued that Hemingway should be read as a life-style writer or a self-help guru. This was what I said to others, but the truth was that, when I first read Hemingway and fell in love with art, I believed that it would rescue me from my feelings of uselessness, from sexual envy, from worries about money. Because all these remained, I had to put my peevishness somewhere.

For decades, I didn’t reread any of Hemingway’s major novels. But, whenever a previously unpublished story was discovered, I read it. “I Guess Everything Reminds You of Something,” which was included in “The Complete Short Stories,” seemed so obviously great and in such a different way from Hemingway’s other stories that I felt immature for having thought I could judge him.

I recently decided to reread “The Sun Also Rises.” I read the first line but the sentence’s balance and the stillness this generates didn’t impress me. It felt like the sort of solution to a pacing problem that an M.F.A. student would come up with. And the second sentence with its “that”s seemed less clever and brave than so many other examples of the same device I now knew. For example, the opening of Dostoyevsky’s novel “The Gambler”: “I’ve finally come back from my two-week absence. Our people have already been in Roulettenburg for three days.” Here, the opening sentence is disconcerting because the speaker is coming back to a physical space, but is returning from an absence, which is not a physical space. Can one return from an absence? If one cannot return from an absence then one is not back.

But the real problem I began having with the book was that from the very first paragraph it is virulently antisemitic. The opening paragraph has a Jewish character whose nose is described as being improved when it is broken. To me, as a teen-ager, the book’s antisemitism had seemed merely a device to separate those who knew how to live properly and those who did not; I had not registered its ugliness. Now, it gave me the heebie-jeebies.

And as the book went on there was more and more ugliness. There was misogyny, of course: women are harpies or one of the boys. There was also homophobia: the narrator acknowledges that one should not hate homosexuals but he does: “Somehow they always made me angry. I know they are supposed to be amusing, and you should be tolerant, but I wanted to swing on one, anyone, anything to shatter that superior, simpering composure.” Although the book makes positive claims about what one should be—brave, admiring of nature and grace—its architecture is held up primarily by hatred of various people and groups.

I found myself reading the book quickly, unable to slow down to the pace that Hemingway’s style requires, knowing, as I sped through, that what I was doing was as senseless as taking big gulps of a grand-cru wine. Periodically, I was shocked by the book’s brilliance—in the bar scenes where so many people are talking, for example, and the reader is hovering among them—and by its breathtaking beauty. More significant, in addition to being wretched, the book is also periodically wise.

After describing the funeral of someone killed by a bull, Hemingway tells us what happened to the bull:

The bull who killed Vicente Girones was named Bocanegra, was Number 118 of the bull-breeding establishment of Sanchez Taberno, and was killed by Pedro Romero as the third bull of that same afternoon. His ear was cut by popular acclamation and given to Pedro Romero, who, in turn, gave it to Brett, who wrapped it in a handkerchief belonging to myself, and left both ear and handkerchief, along with a number of Muratti cigarette stubs, shoved far back in the drawer of the bed-table that stood beside her bed in the Hotel Montoya, in Pamplona.

While the novel seems to equate bravery, as manifested through behavior in the bullring, with moral clarity, here the emblem of bravery has been turned into garbage. Bravery in the bullring does not lead to clarity outside it. Hemingway rejects the idea that one thing can explain another. He acknowledges that things are always and only themselves. But although he nods at this wisdom, he continues to ignore it, by remaining committed to the idea that by being stoic, by valuing and appreciating certain acts of machismo, like bullfighting or fishing, one can escape moral chaos. This is like Hemingway saying, “I know, I know,” to a counter-argument, and then going on to say the direct opposite of what he has just claimed to know.

I finished the book and felt disappointed with myself for not having been a more generous reader. I also believed that whatever I might gain from rereading Hemingway, it probably wouldn’t be worth the irritation. ♦

For this week’s Infinite Scroll column, Brady Brickner-Wood is filling in for Kyle Chayka.

What you expected from this past weekend’s winter storm likely depended on where you got your weather news. If you watched the Weather Channel or visited the National Weather Service web page, you’d have learned about the “increasing threat for accumulating snow” or “possible” freezing rain in your area, each report hedged with a modicum of uncertainty. Snow and rain can be difficult events to predict because long-range models shift from day to day, and sometimes from hour to hour, with general patterns of pressure, precipitation, air speed, and temperature fluctuating constantly in the run-up to a big storm. This is why professional meteorologists speak in potentialities and probabilities, identifying trends across many different models to determine the likelihood of a given outcome. But probabilities are less sexy than proclamations, ambiguities less attractive than assurances—or so the rising number of storm-hyping accounts on social media seem to suggest. “I’ve looked at EVERY Major Weather Model that exists,” the weather influencer Brady Harris wrote on X, on Friday. “I’ve looked at numbers. I’ve looked at the trends. They all point to 1 THING.” That thing? Snow—and not just any run-of-the-mill snow, but, according to Harris, the “Big Snowstorm we’ve all been waiting for.”

Yes, weather influencers exist, and their accounts—along with those of social-media-driven weather brands—have become increasingly popular thanks to their flair for the dramatic. Compared to their credentialled meteorologist counterparts, engagement-driven accounts run by private weather services and amateur storm chasers tend to exaggerate possibilities and foment hype for anticipated weather events, presenting forecasts as facts and predictions as guarantees. Despite using the same models as the professionals—anyone can freely access National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data, which are collected in part by government-owned satellites, planes, weather balloons, buoys, radar systems, and weather stations—private forecasters and solo enthusiasts are not beholden to the American Meteorological Society’s best practices, which caution against overstating certainty and posting raw data without explanation. When a private, subscription-based company such as BAM Weather posts graphics of individual model runs to social media, for instance, the run data may not be indicative of a wider trend or probability; the forecast scenario may vanish from a run conducted only a few hours later. While there is nothing implicitly malicious or unethical about posting individual model data or visuals to social media, there are risks. A single model run may be misinterpreted as an actual meteorological forecast, or, more concerning, an inevitability. If you’re scrolling social media and see a Rothko-like weather map warning of a massive winter storm—surely you’ll take notice.

BAM Weather is a vital member of what can be referred to as “Weather Twitter”; it produces graphics and model data that feed into the intense social-media hype cycle before a big storm. Weather influencers often cite these graphics when making grand statements or predictions about an upcoming storm, sometimes even calling out the model data as inaccurate or biased. Last week, as forecasts for the expected storm over the weekend intensified, BAM posted a trio of model runs that hinted at an updated storm track: “New ECMWF is in. NW again.” On the map, everything north of Tennessee was blanketed in purples and pinks and blues, signalling heavy snow, while everything south was bone white—meaning no snow, not even an inch. Mitch West, a South Carolina-based weather influencer, took umbrage with these selective model runs, writing on X that “BAM must be stopped. He is family. But they have won the battle today. We won yesterday. Tomorrow is a new day. The South must take back what is ours.” For West, who is a storm chaser, snow in the South would be a rare and sacred gift, one that the weekend storm was portending to produce throughout the region. After tracking many meteorological forecasts, he had gone on record anticipating a “long duration winter storm” across the Southeast. But then BAM pulled up to the party with its individual model runs, making inferences that swung the narrative. Tomorrow would produce a new model run, West promised—and it would hopefully show that snow was set to dump on the South.

In this way, Weather Twitter’s various factions and dramas mirror that of professional-sports discourse. Like the weather, there is no surefire way to predict the result of a sporting event or a player’s performance despite the overwhelming amount of data and advanced metrics at the disposal of both fans and professional analysts alike. This does not prevent the sports-media ecosystem from orbiting around prediction-making, an obsession that has only ballooned in the age of legal sports betting. Debate shows, podcasts, and pre-game analyses are dominated by broadcasters and former players projecting unprojectable events with stone-cold confidence; online, sports discourse is fuelled by hot takes and preposterous hypotheses, the whole enterprise a ceaseless pontification of what is yet to come. Picking winners and losers, heroes and villains, pathways to success and failure, generates excitement for an event and manufactures a sense of urgency for maximal viewing pleasure. If an analyst is correct, they can claim intellectual superiority over others in the field; if they’re wrong, they can blame any number of unforeseen forces for the error. Some sports commentators dive deep into the data, running simulations and calculating expected probability outcomes before making their picks. Maybe such meticulous data mining pays off—but maybe not. Many of the most popular sports pundits cast off analytics as superfluous nerd drivel. (Terms like “eye test” and “gut check” are often cited as more reliable metrics.) In other words, these analysts are about as likely to make a correct pick as a corgi on TikTok that predicts sporting-event results by hitting a beach ball into a basket.

A Southerner rooting for snow is like a New York Jets fan with Super Bowl aspirations: it’s not impossible, right? For extremely online weather enthusiasts, BAM’s steady torrent of single-model runs can create intense emotional swings, especially those that forecast unlikely possibilities. (“Northern trend wins again,” one account posted after BAM published its no-snow-in-the-South model runs. “Good for me, but feels really awful for the Deep South bros if this were to verify.”) Weather predictions play on anxieties and fears, expectations and hopes, and serve as the perfect launching pad for nonexperts and sensationalists to weigh in on what they think is going to happen. When one weather influencer, Max Velocity, posted about the possibility of “EXPLODING TREES” in the Midwest, panic and trolling ensued, with many people unsure if the warning was a joke or a genuine public-safety alert. Even one of the more reputable internet weather personalities, Ryan Hall, whose YouTube channel staffs a team of meteorologists, and who has more than three million subscribers, often opts for flashy graphics and deceptive provocations to increase engagement. “Here’s Exactly How Much Snow You’ll See This Year,” reads one of his video titles; “This Storm Will Be SERIOUSLY Dangerous,” reads another.

It goes without saying that extreme weather situations are not sporting events. The stakes for predicting a storm or natural disaster are much higher than betting on the winner of the Beef ‘O’ Brady’s Bowl. But this doesn’t stop weather influencers from treating their predictions as if they did indeed win or lose something. On Sunday night and into Monday, BAM’s X feed spilled over with reposts commending the account for its largely correct forecasts. “Hello from Christiana Tennessee. You called it we get ice y’all get a big one,” one user wrote; another observed that BAM is “usually right more often than wrong.” For any remaining doubters, BAM reposted one of its follower’s words of wisdom: “Ignore the weenies.” Mitch West, meanwhile, was licking his wounds on Monday night, when snow still hadn’t touched down in his region of South Carolina. “This storm will be personal to me,” he admitted, on X. “It’s going to really stink if we blow this one.” As West settled into the knowledge that the Deep South would not see much snow this season, he arrived at something like a revelation: “There comes a time where you get tired of just talking about it & want to experience it.” It may be the truest thing anyone on Weather Twitter said all week. ♦

On September 18, 2025, Karam stopped eating. Nearly three weeks earlier, he had been transferred to the California City ICE Detention Facility, a remote facility deep in the Mojave Desert, from Mesa Verde, another ICE detention center, in downtown Bakersfield. At Mesa Verde, Karam, who has a chronic stomach ulcer, had been receiving regular medication, was frequently kept on a liquid diet as prescribed by a doctor, and was able to see medical staff routinely. (Karam is a pseudonym, as he remains detained by ICE and fears retaliation.) Karam had even been approved to see a gastrointestinal specialist for his condition, but he was transferred before the appointment.

When Karam arrived at California City, he informed a nurse who was conducting his medical intake about his ulcer, liquid diet, and the medications he takes daily—some of them multiple times a day. Yet, during his first twenty-four hours at the facility, he received no medication, and later, when he finally began to receive anything at all, they were the wrong pills and were provided with wild infrequency.

As his health declined and his numerous requests for medication went unanswered, Karam decided to go on a hunger strike. By September 22nd, nearly a week into the strike, he was vomiting blood. The next day, he fainted, which triggered a “code blue”—a life-threatening medical emergency—that brought him to the medical clinic. There, according to Karam, he was kept for two or three hours as a health-service administrator named Ms. White took his vitals, and told him that it would be another two weeks before he could see a gastroenterologist for his condition. For the next three days, multiple staff members at California City told Karam that he would only get his medication if he ended his hunger strike.

About a week later, Karam ended his strike, and staff assured him that he’d be able to see a doctor and receive his proper liquid diet. But it would be more than a week until he finally saw that doctor, who not only told Karam that there would be no appointment with a G.I. specialist but that he should “go back” to his country to get the medical care he needs.

In the three months since, Karam’s medical condition has continued to worsen and remains untreated. He told me that he has developed mouth ulcers, still vomits blood, and has blood in his stool. Karam has gone on three additional hunger strikes since September.

After speaking with several current and recently released detainees from the California City ICE Detention Facility (C.C.D.F.), I have learned that Karam’s experience of medical neglect there is pervasive. These detainees reported adequate care at other ICE detention and processing facilities they were previously held at, and described the California City facility as unique in its mistreatment of those held in its custody. Time and again, detainees told me that they experienced extremely delayed appointments with health-care professionals, the denial of medications and treatment, experiences with unsafe and unsanitary living conditions, and a general antagonism by medical staff toward detainees.

“California City is extraordinarily isolated, it is extraordinarily brutal and cruel, it is extraordinarily deprived of adequate medical care,” Tess Borden, an attorney at the California nonprofit Prison Law Office, explained to me.

In November, Prison Law Office joined the firm of Keker, Van Nest & Peters, the A.C.L.U., and the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice in filing a class-action lawsuit against ICE and the Department of Homeland Security on behalf of those detained at California City. As noted in the filing, detainees refer to C.C.D.F. as a “torture chamber” and “hell on Earth.” In fact, Borden says, the conditions at the facility are so terrible that detainees are resigning themselves to self-deportation, instead of pursuing asylum and other immigration cases, and that “people are also trying to take their own lives.”

In April, 2025, as deportations ramped up nationwide, the for-profit prison company CoreCivic repurposed a decommissioned prison in California City into an immigration detention center after signing a contract with ICE. The company already owned the prison, which had sat unused since 2023, so the contract, which is worth an estimated a hundred and thirty million dollars annually, was a valuable source of revenue for CoreCivic. Additionally, the CoreCivic property has helped address ICE’s growing need for detention space in a state where the agency has turbocharged its immigration-enforcement activities. If fully occupied, C.C.D.F. will be the largest detention center on the West Coast—and one of its most remote.

C.C.D.F. is situated two hours north of Los Angeles, deep in the Mojave Desert, and about sixty miles from the edge of Death Valley National Park. Temperatures can be below freezing in the winter, and well over a hundred degrees in the summer. “It’s hard for attorneys to get out there,” Mario Valenzuela, a lawyer who represents multiple clients at C.C.D.F, told me. It is a three-hour round trip from Valenzuela’s office in Bakersfield out to California City, and the detention center is so desolate that he often can’t find cell service. He told me, “There’s nothing around, just barren desert, then all of a sudden you come across this facility.”

The closest town to C.C.D.F. is California City, about five miles away, where about a quarter of residents live below the poverty line, and roughly eighteen per cent are unemployed. As of 2024, CoreCivic is one of the town’s largest employers. But, despite signing a contract with ICE, ongoing litigation alleges that the company has not secured a business license or the proper conditional-use permit for the facility with the municipal government of California City. Since it opened, C.C.D.F. has allegedly been operating in direct violation of A.B. 103, a state law that requires a hundred-and-eighty-day waiting period and two public hearings before a private corporation may repurpose a facility as an immigration detention center. An active lawsuit is currently deciding these claims, but, even if the courts side with CoreCivic, the company seems to have acted in a legal gray zone when opening C.C.D.F.

On August 27th, CoreCivic began receiving detainees at C.C.D.F. In September, a federally authorized monitor visit by Disability Rights California raised “serious concerns” about the facility’s significant disrepair, caused by the period it sat vacant and the subsequent “rush to open.” That month, five hundred migrants were believed to have been transferred to C.C.D.F. In November, Prison Law Office estimated that eight hundred detainees were being held at the facility, and by mid-January the count was fourteen hundred. C.C.D.F. is projected to reach its full capacity of two thousand five hundred and sixty people in the first quarter of 2026.

“Any claims there are inhumane conditions at the California City Correctional Facility are FALSE,” the D.H.S. assistant secretary for public affairs, Tricia McLaughlin, said in an e-mail, adding that “ICE is regularly audited and inspected by external agencies” to insure its facilities comply with “national detention standards.” With regard to medical treatment, McLaughlin said that the agency provides “comprehensive medical care.” A representative for CoreCivic added that the company has “submitted all required information for a business license and [continues] to maintain open lines of communication with city officials.”

Still, as detainee numbers have surged, staffing and basic infrastructure have clearly not kept up. In a letter sent to D.H.S. last month, California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, warned that “the facility does not have enough medical doctors for its detainee population size,” and the staff it does have “appear to be inexperienced and lack basic understanding of civil detention management principles.” On January 20th, Senators Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff toured the facility and spoke with the warden as part of an oversight visit. “Far and away, the biggest concerns were about lack of medical attention,” Senator Padilla told me by phone after his visit. He compared the facility’s conditions to what he saw during a tour of migrant detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay last year, explaining that it can take “weeks or months” for a detainee to receive care, “even for matters that, in my mind, seem pretty urgent.”

For Yuri Alexander Roque Campos, a thirty-year-old detainee living with a life-threatening heart condition, those factors proved almost fatal. After being transferred from Mesa Verde to C.C.D.F. on September 5th, Roque Campos (who is named in the class-action lawsuit) was denied his heart medications before he even saw an intake nurse, and did not receive aspirin for five days. As a result, Roque Campos suffered what was described by doctors as a “pre-heart attack” and was rushed to the emergency room twice during his first two days at California City for extreme chest pain and paralysis. Roque Campos lost consciousness en route to the hospital during the first trip.

Todd Randall Wilcox, a correctional health-care physician and the former president of the American College of Correctional Physicians, reviewed the medical records associated with Roque Campos’s hospital visits, as part of expert testimony for the class-action suit. “The emergency room doctor expressed serious hesitation to send him back to California City,” Wilcox wrote. The hesitation was justified. When Roque Campos returned to California City, his medical records and a letter from the E.R. doctor explaining his reluctance to discharge Roque Campos were confiscated. Roque Campos was then placed in an isolated observation cell for eight days, where he received medication sporadically. He would not see a doctor for over a month. This ordeal put Roque Campos “at significant risk for sudden cardiac death,” Wilcox concluded in his review, and he was not the only detainee facing this risk.

Fernando Viera Reyes, a fifty-year-old man detained by ICE, had been receiving adequate care at Golden State Annex, an ICE facility in the northern suburbs of Bakersfield, for elevated prostate-specific-antigen (P.S.A.) levels. In March, 2025, Viera Reyes was seen by a urologist who insisted he get a prostate biopsy to find out whether cancer was present. But, before a biopsy could be conducted, Viera Reyes was transferred to California City, in late August. Despite Viera Reyes showing symptoms like bloody urine, C.C.D.F. medical staff only supplied him with Flomax, a medication used to treat enlarged prostates, on an infrequent basis. When he asked a doctor for pain medication, the doctor gave him Vitamin C. “I am very concerned I have prostate cancer and it is taking a very long time to get it diagnosed and treated,” Viera Reyes wrote in a declaration for the class-action lawsuit in early December.

Between January and October, Viera Reyes’s P.S.A. levels jumped from 6.3 to seventy-four, suggesting a very high likelihood of prostate cancer. Wilcox condemned his treatment. “Mr. Viera Reyes’s treatment as it relates to his prostate condition thus far at California City constitutes a complete dereliction of duty by the medical staff. Every day that this is delayed increases this patient’s risk for metastatic disease.”

Gustavo, yet another detainee at C.C.D.F. who has suffered from inadequate medical attention, spoke to me from inside the detention center, and asked me not to use his last name. He told me he thinks CoreCivic staff aren’t providing adequate medical care because they are basically waiting out the clock. They are acting as if “everybody who’s here is gonna be deported,” Gustavo told me. “That’s why I think that they don’t want to spend any money on medication, because they figure we’re just gonna get sent to Mexico.”

On December 16th, the California City Planning Commission held its second public hearing regarding CoreCivic’s repurposing of its facility. Even though the commission scheduled the hearing a week before Christmas, forty people spoke during public comment. One by one, they invoked Nazi concentration camps, Soviet gulags, and the Japanese internment camp at Manzanar, which had stood only a hundred and ten miles north of C.C.D.F. The public commenters condemned the planning commission for not doing more to stop CoreCivic and ICE. “You guys have blood on your hands already,” one said. “I think you’re in way over your heads. I don’t think you anticipated this happening in this little city,” another said. “I did not anticipate a concentration camp in my town.”

But the central question raised during public comment was procedural: How was C.C.D.F. even allowed to open in the first place if CoreCivic appeared to be in direct violation of California state law and local municipal codes?

“They’re open because they want to be open,” Marquette Hawkins, the mayor of California City, told me a few days after the planning commission’s hearing. “Are we, as a city, to go out there and station our thirteen officers around the building to blockade it? Are we, as the city—am I as a mayor—to go out there and lie in the middle of the street in front of the buses? I mean, what people are asking is not realistic.”

When I pressed Hawkins on the city taking a stand against ICE and CoreCivic, he responded that there is a calculation that must be made, “regardless of what my moral stance is,” adding that “the calculation is the revenue that CoreCivic brings with that facility and the jobs that it brings.” Hawkins acknowledged that the calculus sounds “distant and cold,” but he described himself as a pragmatist and dismissed many of the complaints of mistreatment specified in the class-action lawsuit. “That sounds bad, taking these things in isolation,” he said, but, citing conversations with the warden of the facility and in speaking with employees of C.C.D.F., he added that its possible detainees are “strategically” causing problems “to then go, ‘Well, I have to report on this because this is what happened.’ ”

This failure of municipal government to adequately address federal overreach in immigration policy is a pattern that ICE is relying on across the country to push its agenda forward. CoreCivic appears to be operating C.C.D.F. in violation of municipal code and state law without any consequences, and though it may not be the sole responsibility of Hawkins or the California City Planning Commission to hold CoreCivic, ICE, and D.H.S. accountable for everything that occurs at the facility, municipalities are a primary defense against potentially illegal activity within their city limits.

On December 22nd, after weeks of litigation, ICE and D.H.S. responded to a temporary restraining order filed on behalf of Yuri Alexander Roque Campos and Fernando Viera Reyes, demanding immediate care for the two men in the face of significant harm and potential death. The agencies agreed to send the two men to the necessary specialists within three weeks, and to “ensure timely compliance with all follow-up orders for treatment and medication.”

I reached out to CoreCivic about the health-care conditions at their facility. A company representative responded that “our health services teams follow both CoreCivic’s standards for medical care and the standards set forth by our government partners.” The company added that its staff are medical professionals “who contractually meet the highest standards of care.”

But, in November, the class-action suit alleges CoreCivic’s hiring page had nine open job listings related to medical care at C.C.D.F. By early December, eight of those listings were still open, including physician, psychiatrist, and advanced registered nurse practitioner. Just as the company seems to have rushed to open C.C.D.F. without proper legal approvals, they were still hiring medical professionals months after opening.

But staffing issues do not fully explain the lack of basic medical care at California City. “They do it so you give up,” Julio Cesar Santos Avalos, who was a detainee at California City from September to November, told me. When he arrived at C.C.D.F., Santos Avalos recalls a consistent push by staff for detainees to sign away their rights and self-deport. Instructions for how to self-deport are displayed prominently near phones where detainees communicate with their lawyers. Santos Avalos and many of the detainees and attorneys I spoke to believe the lack of medical care is part of that push. The detention center is aiming to make conditions so terrible that detainees stop fighting and decide to leave. Santos Avalos, who suffers from chronic pain owing to a foot deformity caused by childhood cases of polio and Guillain-Barré syndrome, was denied his pain medication and made to sleep on a top bunk until he broke under the pressure and self-deported to El Salvador.

I asked Julio Cesar Santos Avalos if he knows the next time he’ll be able to see his children, both of whom still live in California. “I can’t return as a permanent resident anymore,” Santos Avalos, who is in El Salvador for the first time since he left four decades earlier, at the age of seven, said. “And for what? Just because some guy says we’re illegal, we’re criminals? Look at Trump’s wife. His wife is a criminal too, then, right?”

In two years, Santos Avalos’s son may be able to apply for a visa on behalf of his father. In the meantime, he told me, “it hurts that I’m not there for them because I was there all the time for them. But, I talk to them every day, and I tell them I love them every day.”

Though all detainees at C.C.D.F. are meant to be held pursuant to laws regarding civil detention, the experience they describe is harsher and more restrictive than that of many criminal prisoners. “It’s important to locate the conditions at California City within this federal Administration’s punitive approach to immigrants,” Borden, the lawyer with Prison Law Office, told me. She cited a post on X, in February, 2025, by Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, that told immigrants, “Do not come to this country or we will hunt you down, find you, and lock you up.” In August, Noem reiterated those comments when she told CBS News that “overwhelmingly, what encourages people to go back home voluntarily is the consequences.”

Mario Valenzuela views this messaging as the origin of much of the mistreatment in ICE detention. “The officers and everybody that falls below them, they feel emboldened to be aggressive like never before,” he told me. With each passing month, those aggressive tactics test the moral and legal boundaries, only to be met with insufficient resistance, which, in turn, emboldens the federal immigration apparatus to push it even further. “It’s coming from the top,” Valenzuela said, “this feeling that they can do whatever they want. There’s no accountability.” ♦

“A new ‘Game of Thrones’ series!” you might be thinking. “Time to unroll my map of Westeros.” Well, unroll away—but “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” despite its name, won’t require a refresher on the distance from Sunspear to Dragonstone. The six-episode series, which débuted this month on HBO, has a small-scale focus, and its first season takes place on a small bit of map. Unlike “Game of Thrones” and its prequel “House of the Dragon,” it doesn’t aim for epic. Based on George R. R. Martin’s series of novellas “Tales of Dunk and Egg,” and a welcome return to character development, “Knight” centers on the adventures of Dunk (Peter Claffey), a strapping naïf otherwise known as Ser Duncan the Tall, and his spectacularly bald boy squire, Egg (Dexter Sol Ansell). Each wants to prove himself, and for that to happen Dunk must triumph in a jousting tournament. That’s pretty much the plot.

Where “Thrones” was a soaring fantasia of ice, fire, dragons, and direwolves, and “House of the Dragon” was a saga spanning decades, “Knight” is a gentle buddy dramedy. It wants to give us a frisson of the old “Thrones” feeling but also wants to subvert it. The series signals this early in the first episode, when we watch our aspiring knight contemplate his future and get a good idea. Inspiration strikes, strains of the “Thrones” theme music begin to swell—Oh, boy!—and then abruptly stop; the scene shifts to Dunk crouching beside a tree, naked rump majestically spraying shit. “[Wet splatting], [relieving sighs],” the subtitles explain. Moments such as these help indicate whether the show is going to be your bag.

“Knight,” created by Ira Parker with George R. R. Martin, is set a century before the events of “Thrones.” As the series opens, Dunk, a squire, stands on a desolate one-tree hillside, lowering the body of his mentor, the late Ser Arlan of Pennytree (Danny Webb), into a grave. “I don’t know the right words,” Dunk says. “You were a true knight. You never beat me when I didn’t deserve it.” (Well, except that one time.) Later, lying under a sunny sky, he brainstorms aloud, talking to his three horses. Should he go to King’s Landing? Lannisport? Join the City Watch? He imagines this, brandishing Ser Arlan’s longsword: “Stop raping, ser!” Hmm, the sword fits his grip. And hmm!—the good idea cometh. “There is a tourney at Ashford Meadow . . .” he says, thoughts visibly moving across his face and firming into resolve.

So the journey begins. The first episode is largely Eggless, but he makes a memorable impression. Approaching a tavern with his horses, Dunk, in a grubby cloak and a rope belt, encounters a tiny bald kid, assumes he’s the stable boy, and tries out his new knight persona, demanding oats and a palfrey rubdown. He doesn’t wonder why this well-spoken, curious child resists confirming that he’s the stable boy. (Egg has some secrets.) “You’ll get a copper if you do well, and a clout in the ear if not,” Dunk says, a threat we can’t imagine him carrying out. The mysterious Egg scoffs at Dunk’s rope belt but offers to be his squire. Dunk declines; soon enough, Egg has found him again.

Dunk is a bit of a lunk. He hits his head on a doorframe, twice; in the second episode, he observes, during a moment of philosophizing, that people have always said he was stupid. (“And?” Egg asks, expecting a pep talk. But that’s the whole anecdote.) Still, Dunk believes in himself, like any good hero, and people are drawn to his guilelessness. He’s also an outsider. Ser Arlan had been a hedge knight—a freelancer of sorts, who roamed the realm doing chivalric things and making his home where he found it. In flashbacks and outdoor domestic scenes, Dunk seems at home and at peace in nature, outside of society. But like most of us, he must make his living within it. In Ashford, where a camp has been set up for the tournament, he tells the registrar of his desire to enter and joust; Ser Arlan knighted him before he died, and he wants to serve the realm and protect the weak. But is he really a knight? the registrar wonders. Busting Dunk’s chops while hocking into a tankard, the registrar says that if he’s somehow revealed not to be a real knight they’ll administer “the Ashford chair”: lower him naked onto a sharpened point and fuck him dry, har har! But seriously, he needs a real knight to vouch for him. Dunk looks befuddled, but then another idea occurs—Ser Manfred Dondarrion of Dorne will surely remember me, from when Ser Arlan knighted for his father!—and he sets off to find him. We might not share his confidence.

Outside a tent, Dunk is told, by two of the show’s jaded yet cheerful prostitutes, that Ser Manfred is busy napping. They also chuckle at Dunk for being a hedge knight. “Like a knight, but sadder,” one says. (“We’re not sad,” Dunk mutters to his horse. “Certainly not rising-to-the-level-of-a-comment sad.”) He meets a pair of cousins who are fighting in the dirt, then decides to “seek quieter accommodations,” and goes off to make a home in the hedges. In the wilderness, to a strummy, whistling score, Dunk bathes in a stream and beats his clothes against a rock. Some of “Knight” ’s most enjoyable scenes are these peaceful idylls, when Dunk is off on his own or with a companion; they offer insight about the difference between solitude and loneliness.

In the first episode and the second, Dunk continues to strike out with gouty, dissolute Ser Manfred, as well as with other high-born men of distinction who might vouch for him. A montage of tender and funny flashbacks opens the second episode, with a voice-over of Dunk making appeals about Ser Arlan to men of House Florent, House Hayford, and House Tyrell, putting a generous spin on the old man’s distinctions. “He said it was you, m’lord, who told him that a hedge knight was the bridge between lords and the smallfolk,” Dunk concludes to Lord Tyrell. Tyrell spits, unmoved. “I know him not, man,” he says. After all this, Egg asks the obvious: “Was he a shit knight?”

There’s something universal in this early quest of Dunk’s, the recalibrating that comes with beginning to make your own way in the world, the continual realization that the world of your youth was smaller than it had seemed. But through Dunk’s own distinctions—his earnestness, his will, his towering, if ungainly, form—he makes some progress, too. A comely puppeteer (Tanzyn Crawford) helps him repaint Ser Arlan’s shield; the nicer of those cousins fighting in the dirt (Shaun Thomas) brings him to a rollicking feast hosted by Ser Lyonel (the Laughing Storm) Baratheon (Daniel Ings), an antler-crown-wearing raconteur with a Dinklageian lust for life. By the party’s end, Dunk and the Laughing Storm are having a heart-to-heart booze-and-chat, and the antlers are on Dunk’s head. These budding friendships, his yin-yang mentorship of Egg, and a connection with Prince Baelor Targaryen (Bertie Carvel), a kindhearted noble who actually does remember Ser Arlan, will shape his fate as the series unfolds, in chivalric challenges on and off the tiltyard.

“Knight” ’s episodes are shorter and fewer than “Game of Thrones” episodes, and its scope, which allows for reasonable pacing, succeeds in all ways but one: the show, which was created and written largely by men, can feel like it. The first season, adapted by Parker from Martin’s 1998 book, has signposts of an earlier era—women are an afterthought, “Ashford chair” jokes are all in good fun—and its obvious joy in things like loogie-hawking, bowel-emptying, and an old man’s comically huge dick isn’t shared by viewers like me. “Game of Thrones” made an effort in this regard, including, among its thrills and horrors, details and characters to entertain almost anyone. With the notable exception of its two sensitively evoked leads, “Knight” doesn’t. In later episodes, grime and grunting and fighting abound, reminding me of “Thrones” battle boredom and the White Walker army. (During one such longueur, I had a bumper-sticker idea: “I’d rather be watching ‘Heated Rivalry.’ ”) But if you love and miss this seven-kingdomed world, Dunk and Egg make excellent companions for the return. ♦

Last week, I asked if modern political movements, especially on the left, could survive without the church. Social media serves as an outrage machine that can fuel big street demonstrations, but, without any real-world infrastructure, it cannot sustain the momentum needed to make actual social change. Can religious leaders help rectify this? Or does the decades-long decline of religious attendance mean that the church can no longer provide either a shared vision of how to treat people or the actual people to show up at a protest?

Two years ago, I wrote about Wayne Hsiung, the founder of the animal-liberation group Direct Action Everywhere, or DxE. Hsiung is among the most interesting activists I’ve encountered, in part because he faces a nearly impossible task: the public does not like animal-rights activists, and, even if people don’t want beagles to be tortured in testing facilities, it’s relatively easy for them to turn a blind eye to such things. That challenge of advancing a cause that not many people will get behind forced Hsiung and DxE to come up with increasingly novel ways to further their aims. Most famously, they engaged in so-called open rescues, breaking into breeding facilities and factory farms, basically kidnapping distressed animals, and then giving them new homes. Hsiung’s mission, outside of saving animals, was to get arrested and charged with various felonies so that he could then represent himself in court and argue that helping an animal in distress is legally justified.

But, last year, Hsiung made a surprising announcement: he was enrolling in a seminary. In a blog post about the decision, he wrote, “I have spent most of the last 20 years of my life understanding the power of disruption. But one cannot disrupt, effectively or sustainably, when one stands alone. The next chapter of my life will be exploring how to create the scaffolding that helps people stand as a community. And for that purpose, you may see me soon in a surprising place. My journey is taking me across the country into the ministry.” He began studying at Union Theological Seminary, in New York, that August.

It struck me at the time that Hsiung had only arrived at the church after exhausting nearly every other option for pursuing social change, including running for mayor of Berkeley. But, in our many talks across the years, I have always found him to be a deeply serious and intelligent man, and I wanted to know more about why he ultimately decided upon the church. The conversation below has been edited for length and clarity.

Did you grow up going to church?

When I was born, in central Indiana, there were barely any Chinese people. There wasn’t a Buddhist temple within a hundred miles. The only place Chinese people could gather was at a Chinese church in my neighborhood. I don’t think I even coded it as a church, to be honest. I thought it was the place where I could talk to people in Chinese and have Chinese food and have friends. One of the biggest draws was the Chinese school—my mom was the founder and principal.

I can’t say my affiliation with Christianity was very strong, but I did develop a positive association with the idea of moral community—the idea that we could get together, support each other, and try to do something good for one another and for the world. That seemed like an important thing for us to be doing.

When did you start thinking about the role of religion in your animal-rights activism? I ask because the organization you started, Direct Action Everywhere, feels explicitly secular.

I remember having a conversation around 2015 with Doug McAdam, a sociologist at Stanford who studies political movements. For the most part, he thought that DxE was a fascinating demonstration of grassroots mobilization and community-building. But he said one thing that really hit me hard, and made me think we might be on the wrong path: “You’re not really harnessing any particular identity. And movements that don’t have identities behind them just don’t succeed, because they can’t sustain themselves over the long term.”

Fundamentally, what moves people is when they believe they’re fighting for something that’s part of them. If it’s purely about ideology, not about identity, it’s just not going to create sustained mobilization. The example he gave me was the Black church. He told me to read “The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement,” by Aldon Morris.

I already knew a lot about Martin Luther King, Jr., and how the movement collapsed in the late sixties partly because of the loss of faith. There wasn’t the same sense of community and commitment. Doug shared this acronym with me, WUNC, coined by the sociologist Charles Tilly. It stands for “worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment.” When you have those four attributes, you have a successful movement.

I realized there wasn’t a sense of worthiness in our movement, partly because there wasn’t a commitment to some greater moral purpose. In the late stage of the civil-rights movement, it became nihilistic—the Weather Underground, the Vietnam War tearing at the fabric of people’s commitment to nation, to community, to church. Our movement just never had that deep sense of moral purpose that made people feel like, O.K., these people are praiseworthy people.

You don’t think “Don’t kill animals” is a worthy cause?

I think it’s a worthy cause. I don’t think people see us as worthy people. There’s a big difference. It’s not enough to have a good cause. You have to have people believe you’re good people. If anything, it’s almost the opposite—even though people think we’re a good cause, they find us annoying and pedantic.

I remember when Ta-Nehisi Coates went on Ezra Klein’s show after he read “Why We’re Polarized.” He called it a “cold, atheist book.” I think, even when animal rights is at our best, people see us as a cold, hard-atheist movement. There’s sentimentality and emotion about suffering in animal-confinement facilities, but there isn’t this sense that we’re a morally meaningful, upstanding contingent of the broader human community.

I agree that the public thinks you guys are freaks or agents provocateurs trying to advance a marginal cause. How does affiliation with the church change that?

I think it’s a complete antidote to that “freak” allegation. It’s hard to say whether this is a cultural artifact of the past ten thousand years or whether there’s something inherent in humanity—the desire for divine purpose. But, regardless of whether it’s socialization or something inherent, most humans on Earth see the divine as the most morally praiseworthy thing in our communities. This is even true of the cold, hard atheists—the effective altruists. They don’t call the divine God. Their divinity is some form of very strict utilitarianism.

A shared narrative has to involve a story that doesn’t just matter to me. We all have stories about ourselves that are funny or interesting or inspiring, but a lot of times they only matter to us. And there are some stories that affect all of us—the nation-state, universities, sports teams.

The other thing that’s important is a sense of power beyond our comprehension and control. I think that might be inherent to human beings—there’s something about that we almost want to worship.

In the early stages of your movement, how did you think about your identity as a moral, political movement?

We tried to create an identity, and instead everyone just saw us as a cult. That identity was basically veganism.

Looking back at the last fifteen years of organizing, a lot of what we were doing was independently creating practices you see in religion. The blog post I wrote that resonated more than any other was called “The Roadmap to Animal Liberation.” I envisioned a world where authorities and ordinary citizens—everyone who saw an animal suffering—just intervened to help.

It sounds, at the start, like a typical open-rescue scenario: we’re being sneaky; we break into a factory farm; we see these distressed animals; we get them out. But the catalyst for the narrative shift is when we see some farm employees and, instead of us running away—which is what typically happens when we’re caught—they run away, because they realize we’ve caught them. We call 911, the hospitals come, and we start taking all the sick animals out one by one with the entire community supporting us.

So we had this almost utopian vision of the way the world could be. In Christianity, it’s the Second Coming of Christ. In Buddhism, it’s some sort of karmic liberation, Nirvana.

We also had practices that you could describe as rituals. We asked our volunteers to go through nonviolence training, and one of the rituals was practicing getting harassed and responding positively. They’re standing there getting shoved, having people screaming right in their face—basically spitting in their face—saying, “Get the fuck out of here.” And everyone’s all in, committed to nonviolence, and they feel so proud afterward.

We independently came to a lot of the things that religious institutions already do in terms of ritual and vision. But I think the great mistake was, I just don’t think you can actually create identities like animal rights out of thin air. At most, you can remix ones that already exist and are powerful.

Why couldn’t veganism work as an identity? There’s a lot of famous vegans.

Veganism means too many things to too many people. Some people are health nuts. Some are doing it for environmental reasons. Some for ethical reasons. And even the ethical people have differing perspectives—hard-core utilitarians focus on suffering—and then there are people like me who have more ambitious visions. I would like to see a world where every animal has legal rights, where they’re seen as persons and included in our democracy.

But the other thing is, even if we have the same shared commitment, I don’t think you can build a moral community and a moral identity for the future unless you have a shared past as well.

When J. D. Vance said why he chose Catholicism, people mocked him. But I actually thought it was pretty wise. He said, “I really liked that the Catholic Church was just really old.” It goes back two thousand years. It’s the original church.

If you have a group of buddies from some basketball group, there’s something about the people you have shared stories with for twenty years that’s stronger than the people who’ve only been around a year. The O.G. crew really matters.

Veganism doesn’t even have stories. We have Peter Singer and Donald Watson, but they’re terrible stories. Peter Singer sitting in a cafeteria in Oxford getting into a philosophical argument about utilitarianism—that’s just not a very good story.

In the past, you’ve been quite critical about how progressive activism functions today, especially the ways in which it can be self-defeating and constricting. How did those concerns inform your decision to go to seminary?

In our corner of animal rights, we saw massive growth from 2012 all the way through 2018. The number of people coming both to protests and to community events was basically increasing by a hundred per cent every year. By 2018, we had about five hundred highly committed, highly engaged people every month. And then you hit a certain size, and it all starts falling apart because there’s no scaffolding to hold it all together.

You see it get torn apart by infighting. Some people will blame excessive wokeness, but the critiques of wokeness are missing the point—wokeness was not inherent to the problem. The problem was there were no mechanisms for addressing wokeness within the left. We lacked a political immune system to handle disagreements, to elicit truthful opinions from people. A lot of people nodded and went along with even the craziest aspects because there was no mechanism to get feedback from our own people. Everyone just nodded along in fear, thinking, I don’t want to get cancelled.

There are all sorts of threats that can cause communities to fall apart. Having a shared vision inspires everyone to focus on that vision, but it also encourages people to set aside their differences and work things out because they see there’s a bigger purpose. We just never had that sort of shared vision that a religion has—notwithstanding the people who accused us of being a cult.

What is the scaffolding that the church provides?

Some of it is kind of silly, logistical, practical things that are actually quite important. One is just literal scaffolding—a literal building. Physical spaces where people gather are much more important than is commonly understood in movements. Everyone thinks it’s just Twitter and online mobilization, but one of the things that made us powerful when we were most powerful is that people were gathering in person a lot.

Another is institutional scaffolding. Basic things like, Do we have a conflict-resolution process? Do we have a membership process? What are the decisions about how the e-mail list is used? There are all these institutional insights and social technologies that religion has invented over the past ten thousand years that we can just use off the shelf. We don’t have to reinvent everything—like, How do we handle sexual harassment? Not that the church has handled sexual misconduct particularly well, but still.

There are also subtle institutional things that good moral communities do. People have always sought community for romantic relationships—they want to find people who are a good match, who are going to be good people. There’s no place to find that anymore. It used to be through the church. There are subtle ways people can identify good matches through the institutional scaffolding, such as choir and Sunday school. You find mutual inspiration through your love of song or teaching. Hinge and Tinder aren’t doing it.

Two other things in scaffolding are important. One is narrative—some sort of shared narrative, especially older narratives. Old stories are important. And the last one is ritual. The scholar Joseph Henrich, who I’m kind of obsessed with right now, has this paper about the importance of credibility-enhancing displays. One of the ways communities develop group cohesion is by asking all participants to engage in some sort of costly public display. There are terrible examples—fraternities with hazing—but also good ones. Effective altruism has one I think is good: give ten per cent of your income and do it publicly. There are critiques of E.A. that I’m sympathetic to, but that’s a good practice. It demonstrates something about someone when they put their money where their mouth is.

Is this a genuine embrace of the church, or is this a clever activist trying out different theories to get to the same end? I ask because I first heard of you when you ran for mayor of Berkeley, and I can’t help but wonder if you’re just a smart and curious guy who is trying every avenue for his cause.

I don’t think I would have done this if it was just an activist ploy. Even ten years ago, when we started doing direct action and rescuing animals out of factory farms, I said, “The only thing better than being a lawyer doing direct action would be to be a minister.”

But honestly there’s another experience that was quite powerful. I’ve been in and out of jail for our open-rescue campaign—not super long stays, but I’ve been in a lot of different jails all over the country now, and I’ve met a lot of people, and I’ve seen a lot of people in crisis.

It’s really hard to be in jail if you’re an empathetic person, because there’s so much suffering. I’m healthy of body, healthy of mind. I’ve got people writing me letters. Books are being sent to me while I’m in jail. And then you get your Vietnamese cellmate who has no teeth, barely speaks the language, can’t find a Vietnamese book, and no one even knows he’s there. His public defender doesn’t return his calls. He sits there staring at the walls, getting angrier every day, suffering more and more to the point that you can almost see the psychosis developing.

The one thing I saw consistently across many different jails that helped people was faith. People would get together and have a prayer circle, and they’re allowed to hold hands. Men in jail don’t hold hands, but when you’re having a prayer you’re allowed to. That matters to people—the idea that there’s a man in the world who doesn’t hate you so much that he isn’t willing to take your hand and show you some love.

Faith was a route for them to get there. No matter what racial differences, political differences, no matter what macho attitude you have about strength and power and domination, if there’s a supreme being out there—or something akin to a supreme being, maybe a supreme philosophy, maybe a supreme social commitment we’ve made to each other—that allows you to break bread with people you otherwise wouldn’t . . . that’s an amazing fucking thing.

I remember this guy—upper-middle-class dude in Sonoma County, insurance salesman. Meth just ruined his life. He got addicted, ended up in drug dens, started stealing, got sent to jail, got sent back for breaking probation. Everyone in his life had abandoned him. Everything was fucked. But he was a happy person because he found God. He was a leader in the jail, trying to get other inmates to come to prayer, because he realized, This thing I found is so special. It protects me from all the insanity of the world.

That was the first time someone prayed for me. I have a pretty regular prayer practice now, even though I don’t even believe in God, per se, but I pray for people anyway. It was partly because of that experience. I realized how powerful it is to pray for someone, and for someone to know you’re praying for them.

You don’t believe in God? That seems odd for somebody in seminary.

I don’t believe in God in the traditional Christian sense, or the traditional Buddhist or Hindu sense. I think the universe can be explained by the physical laws of science, probably. Science has a better claim to truth than any other paradigm we’ve discovered.

But what Einstein said about God is probably roughly what I believe: there’s great mystery in the universe and great marvel, especially around sentient beings, that might as well be God.

So what’s the vision you have for all this? You’re a well-known activist in seminary and you’re interested in religion for both personal and political reasons. What does all this eventually look like?

To reverse the decline in religious participation in the United States and throughout the developed world through some form of more modern moral community. We desperately need this. It’s funny—we all understand why our kids need this. We just don’t understand it about ourselves.

I see the attempt to merge movements with the church as existential—not just for social movements but for churches, too. Churches have fallen apart largely because they don’t adapt quickly enough. There are beautiful stories and traditions they have to offer, but if they hold on to everything they’ll lose everything, because everyone’s going to run away.

The idea of a muscular form of compassion has been lost since the civil-rights movement. Gandhi and King both said that nonviolence is not for the weak; it’s for the brave. But the left became afraid of strength. Because being strong in your compassion means actually having a position on something, and that’s terrifying if you’re trying to please everybody.

O.K., but how does animal rights, in particular, fit into the vision of the resurgent moral community?

The most powerful part of every religious tradition I’ve studied is its defense of the vulnerable. That’s why people become committed to religious communities—they understand that when they are vulnerable they will be protected, and when they are strong they will protect the vulnerable. That’s the trade.

I’ve made a bet with my life and my resources, and in some cases a bit of my freedom, that one of the most powerful iterations of that core human narrative is our treatment of animals.

When so much of what’s wrong in the world is the narrowing and shrinking of our moral circles, a movement that effectively challenges that has to do the opposite. It can’t just say, “Let’s not throw immigrants out of the country.” We have to have an affirmative vision: “We love immigrants. Immigrants are amazing because we’re all human beings, and God commanded us to love even the Samaritans, to see the beauty even in the Canaanites and the tax collectors and the lepers.”

I think the most powerful and most obvious next iteration for this expansion of our moral boundaries is other sentient beings. We’ve seen rights gradually expand for all different classes of humans throughout the past two hundred years, since the Enlightenment, and animals are, as Martha Nussbaum has written, the next frontier.

There’s also something unique about our interactions with animals. It has to do with more than ten thousand years of domestication. For most people, the only creature who will truly unconditionally love you is your dog. I’ve seen dogs who are horribly abused who are still desperate for the love of their guardians. It’s horrible how attached they are to the person who’s hurting them. But it happens all the time—it’s because we’ve raised them for thousands of years and selected them for that attribute. But it’s created this intensely vulnerable and loving being that can teach us something about the nature of compassion and love, if we’re able to embrace that lesson.

I think animal rights has something to offer the world.

So there are two parts here. Religion can provide the stories you need for animal rights, but animal rights—this form of compassion at its most pure—can also be used by the church to reverse its decline. But the church is so diminished—it seems like you’re buying into a distressed asset. Can it actually be the vanguard of a movement again?

You call it a distressed asset. I see that as an asset that has opportunities. You’re buying low.

If the church were flourishing, it would be unlikely to be open to change. But, when I walk into churches and I’m the youngest person by decades, everyone wants to talk to me. It’s like a sci-fi movie where all the young have died and someone is born and everyone freaks out.

That presents opportunities. But it’s not just strategic or tactical—it’s theological. Part of the reason the church has declined is that it hasn’t theologically evolved. If there’s a genuine, committed, energetic movement to evolve these theologies, there are huge opportunities.

I’ll ask you plain what I’m trying to figure out myself: Can progressive movements survive without some new grounding in religion?

No. I think left civilization, not just left movements, will die unless there is some form of moral community to organize it all. ♦